


I'll fall in line

by heyshalina



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Angst, College, Gen, More angst, Teen!Chester, applications, this is all steve's fault
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-10-20
Updated: 2014-10-20
Packaged: 2018-02-21 23:46:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,861
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2486729
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/heyshalina/pseuds/heyshalina
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>His eighteenth birthday comes. His eighteenth birthday goes.<br/>Neither John nor Dean say a thing about it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	I'll fall in line

**Author's Note:**

  * For [marshmallowfluff](https://archiveofourown.org/users/marshmallowfluff/gifts).



> A 19th birthday gift for the wonderful fluffbundle that is marshmallowfluff. She wanted this angst bucket, so this angst bucket she gets.
> 
> Best when listening to the self-titled album of Twenty One Pilots, because that's what I had on repeat.
> 
> On a similar note, the title comes from the song March To The Sea by Twenty One Pilots.

Sam comes home one day from school with this friggin’ _giant_ book, paperback and heavy, torn and wobbly, with apparently the name and description of every damn college in the whole country and then some inside its pages. Dad’s not home when they enter the shoddy apartment they’re currently living in and so when Sam pulls the thing out of his backpack, he drops it and lets it slam on the kitchen counter.

“Geez, kid, you’re gonna break your back,” Dean jokes, watching as Sam kicks off his shoes and sheds his jacket. Dean keeps his things on. “What the hell is that?”

“It’s a book,” Sam replies simply, walking to the refrigerator and scrunching his nose at the scarce remains inside. Dean reminds himself to use his lunch money to get groceries tomorrow.

“Yeah, kid genius, you’re always reading books,” Dean lounges on the arm of a chair. “What’s in the book?”

Sam stills in his futile search through the fridge. “It’s a book of colleges.”

“Colleges?” The kid has only been a freshman for a month and a half, Jesus Christ.

“Yeah,” Sam shrugs. “They say you gotta start early, you know? Everything counts.”

Dean laughs and Sam pulls out a nearly-empty bag of Cheetos out of the cabinet. Sam makes his way over to the couch, pulling the book with him. He puts it on his lap and begins to flip through the pages, shoving Cheeto crumbs in his mouth and not noticing Dean watching him. After awhile his head pops up, and the brothers’ eyes link.

“Are you gonna go to college, Dean?” He asks, his voice careful. Sam’s been careful lately, talking to Dean.

“Nah,” he replies, lounging back a bit on his own chair. Sam squints for a second and opens his mouth, but then decides to pick his battles and closes it. He stares at the hole in Dean’s jeans where a werewolf’s claw had snagged him a year before. Dean holds his breath, waiting for the words he’s sure are going to fly from his little brother’s mouth.

“So, there’s this girl in my English class,” Sam says instead.

Dean releases his breath, relieved. His eyes catch the corner of the page Sam has the book open on. He crosses his arms, cocks an eyebrow up. “A girl, huh?”

“Yeah, she’s kinda cute, I guess. She didn’t have a pen today, so I lent her mine.”

“Sammy, you sly dog.”

The power cuts out that night, and October is cold in Illinois. Dad comes home and uses Sammy’s book to fuel the fire he makes to keep them warm. Sam bitches and shouts and cries, yelling about how it’s all so unfair and he didn’t even ask and that had been important to him, threatening to leave (for the first time, but certainly not the last).

Sam screams and Dad screams back, and Dean stares at the flames as they lick the pages away.

.

“Jesus, kid,” Mr. Matthews curses, hand flying to his face. “I swear, I’ve never…I’ve half a mind to drop you down a level most days, you know, but then I think to myself you’d just skip it. You’d probably fail that class, too. You see, you’re holding up the whole damn class, Dean. Just ‘cause you’re just so goddamn stu…listen, here, it’s easy. It’s an easy one. What’s the second derivative?”

 _Thirty-six_ , Dean thinks, but he just sits in his chair at the back of the classroom, his arms crossed and eyebrows furrowed in a deep scowl. Mr. Matthews huffs incredulously at his silence, turning around and muttering to himself.

“Look, kid,” he begins to shout, a vein sticking out in his neck. Or maybe that’s his jugular. God, if only this dick was a shapeshifter or something, Dean could take his knife and find out. “Okay. Okay. Justin, tell Dean what the second derivative is.”

“Thirty-six.”

“Thanks, Justin, you’re a real star,” Mr. Matthews says, voice oozing sarcasm. He goes back to the board and turns his fury onto a girl that answers the next question wrong, letting Dean slink farther back into his seat.

After the bell rings, Matthews keeps Dean back, like Dean expected him to.

“Winchester, you gotta get your crap together,” he lectures, and Dean stares at the clock, watching the seconds tick by. “You can’t just…now, I don’t care what you’ve got going on, I don’t care about the whole tough delinquent persona you’ve built yourself, you’re gonna fail this class, you’re gonna flunk outta school. You’re gonna get nowhere, you hear me, kid? You’re diggin’ your own grave and you’re a step in. So work harder, or just don’t show up at all. You’re already halfway there.”

Dean exits the classroom seething, wanting to punch a kid, wanting to key Matthews’ car, wanting to kill, wanting to _prove himself_ –

He makes out with Susie Jacobs in the maintenance closet instead, and doesn’t feel any better.

.

They kill a Shritga, then they move. John finds a town two hours south with a slew of nearby vengeful spirits, so he makes a deal with a landlord and there they stay. They get enrolled in school–Lord knows why, John predicts they’ll be there for three weeks tops. Sam goes. Dean goes sometimes.

John takes Dean with him for a salt and burn in the nearby secluded cemetery, nothing strenuous, nothing hard. Until John is tossed into a gravestone and the ghost is right in front of Dean, a woman in a dress and a distended stomach, a slash in her neck and across her midsection. He’s frozen, mouth agape, and then he feels the crunch of the woman’s bones under his back as he’s flung into the grave, and dirt is being poured onto him, burying him, and he can hear babies crying, his dad yelling his name, babies _screaming_.

He coughs as his father pulls him from underneath two feet of loose dirt, coughs as his father throws him onto the grass beside the grave, coughs as his father burns the woman’s bones and she disappears, coughs as his father lugs him to the car and drives home, John silent all the while and the infant wails ringing in Dean’s ears.

John orders Dean to go to bed and he does, goes into the bedroom Sam and him share and sits on the hard mattress. Sam’s at a sleepover and Dean doesn’t get out of his clothes, lets his blanket get coated with the dirt that’s caked on Dean’s clothes, on his body, in his throat, daresay on his soul, if he believed in that sort of stuff. He waits forty minutes and then gets up and goes into his father’s room and finds him in the state he expected to but hoped he wouldn’t have to. Dean bends down and gently begins to take the bottle of whiskey from his father’s hand. The fingers on John’s other hand fly out and latch themselves onto the back of Dean’s head painfully, making him maintain his awkward crouching position. The movement only elicits another cough from Dean’s throat, and John begins to laugh sardonically.

“Is this what you’re good for, Dean-o?” John asks, and Dean doesn’t need to look at how much is left in the bottle to know how much John drank. “C-Cleaning up after me? Good thing…not worth much else. I didn’t make... worth much else.”

“I’m sorry, Dad.” Dean croaks. John shakes his head.

“F-Fucked up.”

“I know, sir.” Dean whispers.

John releases Dean, his fingers lax and his eyes closed. Dean stays there for a minute, breathing.

“Dean-o,” John groans. “Don’ want you t’…leave.”

Dean swallows thickly, the words he hears burning in his ears. “Okay.”

“Don’t…” John says. “Leave.”

“Goodnight, Dad.” Dean gets up, taking the bottle with him. He tosses a blanket over his dad and retreats from the room, struggling to breathe.

He stands under the stream of the shower until the water is so cold it’s numbed him, and thinks about Sam’s book burning.

.

There’s a college fair in Champaign, and Sam wants to go; Dad’s gone, so Dean takes him. It’s in the public school’s gymnasium, a few dozen colleges with representatives lined up side by side in rows of tables. Sam gives him a smile and rushes off. He’s within eyeshot, so Dean lets him. He sticks his hands in his pockets and saunters around some of the tables, giving casual looks to some of the names and colors, mascots and locations. The tables have pamphlets and posters, crying in colorful letters about majors and accomplishments, test optional and acceptance rates. The words swirled around in Deans head, confusing him and nearly making him dizzy. He doesn’t want to be here, doesn’t know, doesn’t want–

“You look a little nervous, there, son.” Someone’s voice penetrates his haze, and Dean looks at the man speaking to him from behind a table. He blinks, and regains himself.

“Naw,” Dean shrugs.

The man lifts an eyebrow at him in disbelief, but gives him a shrug of his own. “So, where’re you lookin’ at?”

Dean has to blink again to register what he’s saying to him. “Oh, no, I’m just here for my brother.” He spots Sammy in the corner of his eye and turns to see him fully, talking eagerly to a woman behind the Stanford University table. He turns back and the man is squinting at him.

“You must be nearly eighteen,” he remarks. “You not planning to go college?”

Dean shrugs.

“You know, it’s an okay option.” The man grins at him. “My names Jeff, I’m from SIUE. What’s your name?”

“Dean.”

“Well, Dean, what do you wanna do?”

Dean furrows his eyebrows. “What do you mean?”

Jeff gestures vaguely. “You have any idea what you want to do with your life?”

 _Hunt. Take care of Sammy. Please. Avenge. Take care. Find. Make proud. Live. Want. Breathe. Protect. Take care. Please. Save. Help people_.

“I don’t know,” Dean says.

Jeff smiles. “Had a feeling you’d say that. It’s a daunting question. That’s alright, though, most people don’t. That’s the big secret.”

“What?” Dean asks. He’s stepped closer to the table without noticing.

“That no one knows,” Jeff says. “No one ever really knows. I still don’t know.”

Dean narrows his eyes at the man and his stuffy suit, his close-cropped hair and tidy stubble. “How?”

“Went through four years of undergraduate for biology, went to Law school, currently working as an admissions officer.” Jeff huffs and looks down. “It’s all a cluster. But I like where I am. Do you like where you are, Dean?”

Dean thinks about Mr. Matthews and the failing grades, thinks of his dad, thinks of hunting, thinks of the thrill, the Impala, Sammy, screaming, shouting, books burning, swears and threats and the word _leave_.

“No.”

The word surprises Dean, and Jeff’s eyes soften. “Well, you know, that’s okay. There’s a place for everyone to find out what you wanna do, and where you belong. It might not be here,” Jeff gestures to his poster, “But it’s somewhere. Are you going to apply anywhere, Dean?”

“I, I don’t…” Dean fails. “I can’t pay for it.”

“Some schools will pay for you,” Jeff tells him, and Dean perks up without realizing it. “If you need it.”

“I don’t know.” Dean says, and it seems like his life motto.

“You should.” Jeff says softly when he meets Dean’s eyes. “Like I said, it’s an okay option.” At Dean’s huff, he smiles. “You seem like a good kid.”

“No,” Dean looks at Sam across the gymnasium and smiles. “But I know one.”

.

Dean doesn’t want to _go_ to college–it takes him five nights of sitting against the wall and thinking to come to this–but he just wants to _see_. He just can’t leave his dad and Sammy, no matter how much they could plead or scream at him or at each other. But he thinks that maybe, just maybe, if he could show his dad just one acceptance letter, he’d be less sad about Dean all the time. John has taken to gazing at his eldest and drinking more as Dean’s eighteenth birthday approaches closer and closer, and Dean thinks that perhaps this is what to do about it.

And no matter that Dean is the older brother, he wants Sammy’s pride in him, too. If he applied, and got accepted, well, that’d be enough for Sam. He didn’t have to leave. Sam wouldn’t want him to leave.

Or so he tells himself as he plows through school and applications, just to keep going.

So on a Saturday he walks Sam to library and tells his dad he’s going on an endurance run. He starts his run down the road beyond the apartment and the library, and then takes a right at the school’s gym. He walks inside the doors briskly, pulling out a printed out ticket, his driver’s license, and a pencil, and then takes the SATs.

Their address isn’t permanent, far from it, so he puts down the address of his English teacher, who he asked ahead of time, and afterwards when they move away from Champaign, he sends her a letter with the address of his new Physics teacher, Ms. Kelly, because he makes an effort to be nice to her and he likes Physics. They’re to stay in the shoddy trailer park for a month and a half, which Dean figures is enough time to get his results back. Meanwhile, he spends his time when he’s waiting for Sam leafing through college magazines and lists Ms. Kelly writes up for him, and tries not to feel guilty about doing this instead of practicing his Latin.

He’s sitting in the back of the theater waiting for Sam to finish with rehearsal for a play that he won’t even end up being in, finishing his Physics homework and thinking about how he could fix the catch in his dad’s crossbow that always makes it shoot to the left, when Ms. Kelly walks in quietly and finds him.

“Had a feeling you’d be here,” she whispers, and grins at Dean’s surprised look when she pulls an envelope out of her bag. “This is for you.”

It’s his SAT score sheet. Ms. Kelly winks at him when he goes to open it. “Tell me later,” she says. “Like I said, it’s for you.”

She begins to walk away, but Dean clears his throat. “Uh, Ms., uh, Ms. Kelly,” he stammers nervously. “I, uh, the–the letter, that I asked?”

“You got it, Dean.” She says. “It’ll be done.”

“Thanks,” he says, and he means it. He watches Sam flounce around on stage in some Shakespeare play for a minute before tearing open the envelope and pulling out the score report, his eyes razing it, hungry and scared.

His scores are good. They’re not amazing, but they’re good. Something flutters in his stomach that he tries to suppress, but it’s no use. It’s new to him, and he doesn’t have a tolerance for it like he does for grief, sorrow, and death. Hope and opportunity are things he just can’t get used to. They knock him down every time.

They’re supposed to move again, but John dislocates his shoulder and he finds another job nearby, so he stations them in the town for the next six months until Dean graduates and calls Bobby for help on a few cases. He can’t take anything home, so Dean enlists Ms. Kelly to help him finish his applications and his files for financial aid and then sends them out before Christmas break begins. They ship them out and Dean feels something, but it’s not accomplishment. Part of him wants to take them back. Part of him wants to tell Sam. Part of him just wants a yes.

He fixes the catch in the crossbow. John doesn’t mention it.

.

His eighteenth birthday comes. His eighteenth birthday goes.

Neither John nor Dean say a thing about it.

.

He has a dream one night in February about his mother. He’s in a bedroom (the bedroom, _the_ bedroom) with bare feet on a cold wood floor and he’s surrounded by books, stacks of them, with a bookshelf knocked over and blocking the door. Something drips on his face and he looks up and she’s _there_ and she’s bleeding and then she’s burning and everything’s burning, the pages licking the air and the flame licking the pages and the blood licking Dean’s face, his face and it’s too hot. He tries to get to his mother and then he tries to get to the door, but his leg is chained to the floor and he watches the skin melt away from his bones, but he won’t die, he watches everything he wants burn and he hears Sammy screaming.

When Sam shakes him awake with tears in his eyes he thinks that maybe it was him screaming instead.

.

Dean waits. He waits through February, through March, into April, through skipped lunches to buy bags of Cheetos and bottles of water, cans of soda, boxes of mac and cheese, new socks for Sam and a new needle and thread to stitch up his father’s shirts, his father’s skin. He waits until the day the schools told him he would receive a letter and he skips his last period to go the trailer and check the mail before John got home and he had to pick up Sam. He does this every day for the whole week.

There’s nothing in the mailbox.

Dean thinks that maybe they just needed more time, so he keeps waiting. He waits through the whole month, getting home before his dad and checking the mail to get nothing. He waits through the birthday party invitations Sam gets in the mail and the graduation notifications, through Sam’s birthday and John’s nights of drinking, through placing the bottles of gin on the highest shelves because he’s the tallest in the family, now, but as he keeps waiting he feels smaller.

“What’s wrong?” Sam asks as they drive home, eying the set in Dean’s jaw.

“Who, me?” Dean replies, face changing in a second as he turns to his brother. He winks. “Nothin’, little brother. I’m peachy keen.”

“Uh huh,” Sam says.

Ms. Kelly asks him about his luck one day after class and Dean just smiles and shrugs ambiguously before hurrying out of the classroom. He doesn’t understand, but he doesn’t know to express it. It wasn’t like he applied to Harvard or anything–a few of the schools he had applied to he had picked because he thought that maybe he could get in. He had–he had been pretty sure. Certain.

He goes through the month of May, and then stops going home early to check the mail. Neither Sam nor Dad tell him anything about letters after that, though, and he doesn’t dare ask.

He graduates. They leave. And he doesn’t say a thing.

.

One night in July Sam comes home from playing at the arcade, entering the motel room and depositing the key and his switchblade on the counter, kicking off his shoes. John’s off on a case, and it’s just been him and Dean in some town near Wichita for nearly a week. He’s about to launch himself onto the creaky bed when he hears the shower running. Sam pauses, straining his ears. Normally Dean is loud in the shower when he’s not having private time, singing AC/DC and Led Zeppelin off-key and loud enough to burst Sam’s eardrum. Now, there’s nearly no sound at all. Sam has half a mind to panic that Dean’s passed out or hit his head before he realizes that among the noise of the falling water there’s a soft catch of breath repeating itself. Sam tiptoes to the bathroom door, gears whirring viscously in his head and mouth agape as he listens to his brother cry for the first time in a very long while.

He slides to the floor silently and just listens as Dean quietly sobs, not saying a thing. When Dean comes out his eyes aren’t cloudy or bloodshot, and he’s breathing normally, a towel wrapped around his waist. He takes in the sight of Sam on the bed (the kid had sprinted onto it when he heard the shower turn off) and lifts an eyebrow.

“You okay, Sam?”

Sam blinks, swallows. “Uh, yeah. Yeah, I’m okay. Are you okay?”

Dean looks at him like he’s grown a third head. “Just fine. How’s grilled cheese sound, huh?”

John comes home a few days later and finds Dean sitting at the desk in the motel room, hands folded and mouth shut. Sam’s turned away, watching television, and acts like he doesn’t notice as John walks over to his eldest and places a hand on his shoulder, speaking low.

“Look like you’re waiting for something, Dean-o. What’s got your mind?”

Dean blinks at his father, and doesn’t want to talk, doesn’t want to talk ever again, is afraid that is he opens his mouth the words running in his head will fall out: _worthless, Jesus, kid, prove, digging your grave, choke, leave._

“Nothing, Dad.” he says, and Sam turns his head back to see the two men looking at each other, John’s hand a vice grip on Dean’s shoulder. “What would I be waiting for?”

.

They go back to John’s storage unit one day again, after, just to look. The first time had been too short, too scarce. Dean lays out all of Sam’s soccer trophies and the large one from the one time he entered a sparring competition in eleventh grade, after he’d had his growth spurt. Sam watches as his older brother sorts through the report cards of Sam’s, top corners creased from being pinned with a magnet onto the fridge. Dean pulls out an old crossbow that Sam recognizes vaguely and puts it on his shoulder, aiming it at the wall and smiling sadly.

Sam pulls down a shoebox from a shelf around the corner and stills. He can see his hands shaking, so he clenches them into fists for a moment before beginning to sort silently through the obviously handled papers inside, about eight acceptance letters to different colleges and universities, all addressed to Dean. Sam stares at them, not quite sure how to breathe. He fingers the papers, echoes of where their father had fingered them years before. There are crusted, old alcohol stains on some of the papers, the envelopes cut with a knife underneath the letters. Sam turns around and looks at Dean sitting on the floor, mouth open to speak, ready to say _you applied to college, you wanted to do something different, you wanted to leave, you had dreams, he never told you, you never told me_ –

“What’cha got there?” Dean asks, sparing a quick glance sideways as he smiles at all of Sam’s memories laid out in front of him. Sam feels like he’s going to puke, or cry, or both. He swallows.

“Nothing,” he says, flashing Dean a grin. Dean smiles back.

 

**Author's Note:**

> "Then the wages of war will start  
> Inside my head with my counterpart  
> And the emotionless marchers will chant the phrase:  
> This line's the only way"
> 
> ~March to the Sea, Twenty One Pilots


End file.
